Whispers of the Mind
by CattyFr
Summary: What is left to life when you give up your dreams? When all the color has faded from your world? One shot


Disclaimer:Don't own anything

* * *

It's been ten years now. Ten years since I won back my brother, and lost my dreams. I can't regret my choice, and yet I wish…

"What's said is said," after all. I made my choice and now I must live with it…Forever. But it's only forever… not long at all.

I loved him even then. I knew that I loved him when I uttered those hated words, but I didn't understand that I couldn't loose Toby, that **this** was the choice in which I would loose the only thing dearer to me than my brother. All I knew was that this was the choice that would save Toby for sure.

My dreams died that night when I was fifteen. I lost it all. There are no hopes of love for the only man I could ever love is gone, banished by my own words against both our wills. And without love, or the hope of love there can be no dreams. Even my mirror lost its power in two weeks time.

Now I live merely for Toby. I've thrown myself into loving and caring for Toby. Oh, I went to college and got a degree in business, and now run a small store specializing in fantasy, but it means nothing to me.

I can always see Jareth out of the corner of my eye. His image haunts me constantly, but I know he's not there, can never be there.

It's ironic that for all this I never seem to want for anything. Somehow things always work out. I know it's magic, it couldn't be anything else, but whether it's some gift from the Labyrinth for defeating it, or a gift from Jareth since we are permanently separated I can not know.

* * *

I'm thirty-three now, watching my little girls play in the field at the park where I used to act out portions of my Labyrinth book, the book I still read to my girls every night. I don't tell them that this is the story of their mother and the man she refers to as their father. He's not genetically, but he should have been, and the magic helped me bring him as close as I could to it.

I only saw the man that fathered them twice. I was never able to date, and no one ever really asked me. I always got the feeling that I emanated an aura that said I was off limits. I longed for a family of my own, but with any man but Jareth that was impossible.

The stranger as I've had to call him walked into my store just before closing. At a glance he looked like Jareth, and for a brief moment I hoped in my secret heart that it was Jareth, but the hope died as soon as it was born. We still went out that night, and I left the next morning. Nine months later I had my first daughter. I saw him again two years after the first time, and things went the same way.

It's been five years since that last time, and I don't think I will ever see him again. I didn't even know his name. The girls look like me though. They are almost exact copies. I don't have the same problems many single mothers have, but then again the magic always seems to provide me with the opportunities I need. We do not want for anything.

* * *

I'm all alone again. My daughters, granddaughters, and Toby's girls died a couple years ago in a car accident. After that Toby was never the same. He died this past year on the anniversary of our time in the Labyrinth.

I've spent my birthday alone for the first time in decades. It seems fitting somehow that it's just me sitting here looking at my painting of the Goblin King. Even though now I'm old and withered he still has the same vibrance he always did. I painted his picture soon after I came back. I've never been an artist. I could never draw before, and haven't been able to since, just this one painting. It's always hung near my bed where it is the last thing I see at night and the first thing I see in the morning.

Tonight at midnight I will have spent a hundred years in this world without him, and I wonder if maybe, just maybe this one midsummer I can undo the choice from all those long years ago. If there was ever a time when we could change things, undo the power that bound us to separate worlds, it would be tonight. One hundred years…how many spell fade after that time, how many loves united.

But I'm so weak now, I'm not sure I'll last long enough to see him one last time. And for all his power I'm not sure he can undo what all the years have done to me. I just wish I could see him, and past that I'll have to believe.

The clock strikes midnight. I can barely breath but I'll never get another chance. "I wish…Jareth." The clock has stopped, and he's here.

"What do you wish Sarah?"

"The same thing I've wished for since I was fifteen. You" Already I can breathe easier. He grins that smile that I've never seen anywhere else, and holds out a crystal. As I reach to touch it I see that already the ravages of time are leaving me.

I touch the crystal and we simply vanish to our long awaited happily ever after.

It will be months if not years before anyone notices that I'm missing. I have no friends, and no family to miss me. And when they do notice, I'll have simply disappeared.


End file.
